Precursor to the Organon: Hahnemann’s Occasional Writings

Introduction

It is now over 200 years since Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1755­1843) gave up the practice of allopathic medicine and began, in the nature of all genius, the long, arduous and often lonely search for a better way to restore the sick to health, which is commonly termed homeopathy, although his system of remediation, which he termed Heilkunst (the art, literally, of making people whole), extends beyond the proper meaning of this term.

In these intervening years, as during much of his life, there has been little understanding of the complete aspects of this new system of medicine, and, as a result, the secondary homeopathic literature, as well as the various translations of his works consist of confusion rather than clarity, misconceptions rather than understanding and in some cases, deception rather than perception of the truth of what is written in the legacy bequeathed to mankind by Dr. Hahnemann.

Because of the failure of generations of followers to fully understand the nature of genius as embedded in Hahnemann’s writings, in particular, the Organon der Heilkunst (Organon of the Art of Remediation), which is linked to numerous of his other works, such as Chronic Diseases and occasional articles (collected under the misleading title, Lesser Writings), students and practitioners alike of his system remain confused about basic concepts critical to the proper and effective application of therapeutic medicine according to Hahnemann’s insights.

The purpose of this book is to provide a systematic analysis of Hahnemann’s occasional writings leading up to the Organon using the collection of articles edited and published as The Lesser Writings. A proper knowledge and appreciation of these writings is necessary to a genuine practitioner of Hahnemann’s remedial art. The analysis is based on new insights revealed by a new inter-linear translation of the extended Organon (that is, including its full references) by Steven Decker.

The reader is also referred to the public material available on the Internet through the website, www.heilkunst.com.

Part 1: Disenchantment and Discovery

Our story begins with Hahnemann’s growing disenchantment with the practice of medicine as he had been taught at medical school. He could no longer stand idly by and watch the practices of his day do more harm to his patients than apparent good. His strong sense of justice and ethics led him as early as 1787 to criticize his colleagues in rather harsh language.

How rarely does an honest man, occasionally, succeed in raising himself, by exceptional knowledge and talents, above this swarm of quacks... (Haehl, Vol. I, p. 33)

This deep and abiding sense of honesty and integrity would also eventually lead him into fierce conflict with the apothecaries (pharmacists). Hahnemann was as heavily critical of the all too ­common practice of adulteration of medicines for greater profit as he was of the tendency of doctors to rush as many patients through their offices as possible for the same motive.

Finally, shortly after moving to Leipzig in September 1789, Hahnemann came to the decision to cease the practice of medicine as his conscience would no longer allow it. Because of his scruples, his allopathic practice had never been particularly large, but this was, nonetheless, a difficult decision for a young doctor with a growing family to feed. As a result, he felt obliged to move to a small village outside Leipzig for a year to save expenses and to provide his children with a healthier environment.

Hahnemann was now relying solely on his translations and medical and scientific writings to feed his family of three children. However, he decided eventually to move back to Leipzig in order to further his work once his children’s health had improved. It was here that he wrote his first major work on a new approach to medicine, Friend of Health, which deals in detail with the matter of diet and lifestyle (what we can subsume under the term therapeutic regimen and is based on the use of the natural law of opposites).

He also continued to attack his colleagues for their continued use of injurious methods. We can see from a comment that he made in a translation of a medical book in 1790, that he had begun to dis­cern that there was a problem with the material conception of disease, which attempted to scour out the patient, even if this was by seemingly moderate means. Later, this material conception would lead to Pasteur’s germ theory, in contrast to Hahnemann’s more dynamic conception (involving the supersensible Wesen of the infectious microbe).[1] We can see, as well, that Hahnemann must have had some foreshadowing of the one-sided view of the human being inherent in the idea of simply removing offending disease matter (that is, that this was an attempt to imitate nature’s own crude efforts to remove disease matter, but an effort that was never successful in removing disease, as is shown in chronic disease — leading later to his conception of the dual nature of the Living Power that animates us.

Disenchantment and Discovery

One can only imagine the inner conviction required to abandon the safe confines of authority and to seek, virtually alone and unaided, a better manner of helping suffering humanity, this despite the heavy responsibility of providing for a growing family. Only a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the truth could have induced such behavior and kept him faithful to his decision despite ever-present financial constraints and the enmity of his colleagues. This enmity increased all the more as Hahnemann intensified his criticisms of the excesses and fundamental theoretical bankruptcy of the existing system of medicine, backed by centuries of authority. Hahnemann could call on no authority other than his own con­science and the knowledge obtained from careful observation of nature coupled with the precise application of his reason to the results of his research.

The power of this Old School thinking, as Hahnemann labeled it, is identified in an article he wrote in 1797. The mode of thinking that is derived from authority and not from nature herself, he labeled a disease, and one that is extremely tenacious and dangerous to health (a foreshadowing of his later identification of moral diseases, namely those derived from ignorance and superstition).

An example of his fearless attack against that which he perceived as wrong was Hahnemann’s acerbic comments on a bulletin issued after the death of Kaiser Leopold II of Austria. This monarch had come to the throne in 1790 and his wisdom in averting war with France gained him the admiration of many, including Hahnemann, who saw war as a grave threat to science and health. When the Kaiser died suddenly in 1792, suspicions were aroused. In order to allay these, the Kaiser’s personal physician issued a bulletin. Hahnemann replied in public under his own name to the official explanation that effectively “everything had been done that could have been done.”

The bulletins state:

Despite Hahnemann’s attacks, at this point in his career he still saw some value in blood-letting and some other of the old practices in certain cases. It was not until around 1800-1803 that he came to the firm conclusion that this procedure, as with others, was involved in simply seeking to remove disease matter (materia pecans) and did not lead to cure. At this point, he ceased completely their use and advocation. As he told his students in 1833:

We can see here that the particular idea of disease very much dictates treatment even in the face of the evident failures. What Hahnemann first objected to was the evident excess of use, much as reform minded and caring doctors today tend to criticize excesses in the use of antibiotics or chemotherapy. However, these efforts do not change the system nor the critic’s adherence to them as “necessary,” albeit in a more moderate way. What is required for radical reform (change at the root) is a change in the organizing idea, and this is what happened to Hahnemann next.

In 1796, he gives us an indication that chemistry, with which he had become most familiar and which was emerging as the base for medicine, could not furnish much in the way of answers as the living organism did not obey the same laws as that of the laboratory experiments.

Initially, Hahnemann’s criticism of medicine (drugs) was a practical one, namely that doctors gave drugs without knowing what their true curative powers were. What knowledge existed was for certain constant disease forms wherein the specific remedy (cur­ative drug) had only been discovered by chance and had been preserved in folk medicine. However, beyond these few diseases, there was no knowledge of the curative power of drugs, either singly or in the mixtures then commonly prescribed. When Hahnemann examined the existing materia medicas, he found only hoary authority, careless recounting of successful disease cases (such that no one could ever reproduce the results), and fanciful recipes based on no solid knowledge of the curative properties of the medicines used.

Then he rediscovered the validity of the ancient law of similars in the famous experiment in 1790 with Cinchona bark (quinine). This led him to undertake more experiments (provings) with sub­stances to discover their disease effects, which then became their curative properties. In this context, he also became aware of the dual nature of each medicinal substance in the form of a direct (initial) action and an indirect (counter-action). At that point medicine, using the law of contraries, had been mainly concerned with the direct effects of drugs, seeing the counter-action as a worsening of the disease. Thus, coffee would be used to stimulate the patient, and the later tiredness would simply be a call to repeat the crude dose. Hahnemann’s discovery here, as we will see, is a profound one, still not fully recognised within homeopathy, much less medicine more generally.

Hahnemann was now able to put the two aspects (dual action of the medicine and the law of similars) together: the curative power of a drug, that is, its counter-action, could only be found by its disease effects (artificial) on a healthy person according to the law of similars.

It was here not a matter of authority, but pure experiment (provings) based on law and principle. We can then see a series of discoveries (1790-1801/2), based on careful observation of nature and clear thinking of what he was observing, directed by an emerging idea of disease, and all informed by his growing awareness of the functional duality of nature.

What follows is an historical study of the ideas Hahnemann discovered and developed leading up to the publication of his formal call for medical reform, the Organon, in 1810, as well as the evolution of his thoughts between then and his death in 1843.

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[1] For a fuller discussion of this term and others with which the reader is not familiar, see The Dynamic Legacy: from Homeopathy to Heilkunst or other books in this series.